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Some Thoughts about Reading
If you’re reading this, chances are very good that
you are sympathetic with Thomas Jefferson who "could not bear to
live without books." Or with Henry David Thoreau’s assertion
that "books are the treasured wealth of the world and the fit
inheritance of generations and nations." You’ll no doubt
appreciate the wisdom of Emerson’s notion that "books are of
the best of things and the worst abused." If you’ve spent many
years reading, you may share some of Franz Kafka’s preference for
the kind of books that "wound and stab us…that affect us like a
disaster, that grieve us deeply." Or, as he later put it, "A
book must be the axe for the frozen sea inside us."
For more than 20 years now, I’ve been a voracious
reader and, like Jefferson, I can’t image a life without books. I
now have a personal library with more than two thousand volumes--so
many that I’ve had to list them in a spreadsheet to keep from
accidentally buying books I already own.
I’ve learned a few things about reading that you
might find useful. When I began to read a lot, I made it a habit to
mark the passages I found especially interesting and then I’d write
that page number on the first page of the book. Now, I can pick up any
book that I’ve read, no matter how long ago, and immediately
identify what I found to be the most interesting ideas it had to
offer. That’s how I select the material for the Books Worth
Reading section of my newsletter. Do this, and you’ll always be
able to give yourself a refresher course in a matter of minutes.
Sometimes once isn’t enough. You might be amazed to
discover how valuable it is to reread books you’ve read several
years before, especially books you thought were hard. When you reread
them and can’t figure out why you ever thought they were hard,
you’ll know you’ve made progress. And finally, I’ve learned to
make routine searches for new books from my favorite authors, many of
whom you’ll find listed in this selection. There is tremendous
satisfaction to be gained from reading books that authors you find
intriguing have used as resources. Bibliographies alone can lend
incredible insight.
This section is intended to help competent people
fight proliferating credentialism in today's workplace. We define
credentialism as arbitrary and unnecessarily restrictive requirements
for formal education which are often irrelevant to the work at hand.
These books are arranged by date of publication to give some insight
into the direction of the arguments that have been made against
credentialism and also to suggest where readers can find help in
formulating arguments of their own. Any book listed here without a
link is out of print but may still be available in libraries or
through an inter-library loan program.
Ivar Berg, Education and Jobs,
1970
"The irony will not be lost on some that the
nonrational use of formal credentials, which might be taken as a
significant symptom of ‘bureaupathology,’ is more likely to be
found in our great private enterprises than in our governmental
apparatus." p 175
"The tendency on the part of employers to raise
educational requirements without careful assessments of their needs,
in both the short and long run, can benefit neither managers nor the
system they extol." p. 190
Randall Collins,
The Credential
Society, 1979
"How might the credential restructuring of a
strong profession such as medicine take place? As it stands, American
medical training is attached at the end of a very long and expensive
education that keeps the supply of physicians low and their incomes
and social backgrounds very high. This formal education appears to
have little real practical relevance; most actual training is done on
the job in the most informal circumstances, through the few years of
intern and residency. The existing medical structure is not only
highly expensive, inefficient, and inegalitarian in terms of career
access; but it is also tied to a system of job segregation in which
the menial tasks are shunted off into a separate medical hierarchy of
women with the assistance of low-paid ethnic minorities in service
jobs with no career possibilities."
David Owen,
None
of the Above, 1985
"Tests like the SAT convert the tainted
advantages of birth and wealth into the neutral currency of merit,
enabling the fortunate to believe they have earned what they have
merely been given."
Charles J. Sykes,
Profscam,
1988
"You can learn more in two hours’ random
reading in the library than you can in a semester-long seminar. But if
you take five or six seminar courses plus a colloquium or two, you can
get to be a master of something, with a degree to prove it."
Charles D. Hayes, Self-University, 1989
"It is truly baffling paradox that as a society
we allow the credentialing of experts who are in total disagreement
with one another about the basic nature of their knowledge. Yet we
treat each of them as an expert and defer to them in both simple and
complex matters, knowing intuitively that some of them must be totally
wrong and thus not expert at all but merely misinformed. It would be
much more practical to certify "theorists" whose credentials
would assert their theory and offer supporting evidence for their
position. We would be less vulnerable as consumers if, instead of
approaching practitioners as experts, we regarded them as
fallible." p. 64
"Establishing credentials should be as easy as
proving competence. And proof of competence should consist of more
than proof of attendance and the ability to adapt." p. 141
Charles Derber, William A. Schwartz,
Yale Magrass, Power
in the Highest Degree, 1990
"Experts can rarely prove the validity of
their knowledge. Thus they must create a general perception of
credibility, much as corporations do. The airlines reassure the public
with ../images of rock-solid pilots in full-dress uniform. Pictures of
shinny buses and cheerful drivers illustrate Greyhound’s message
that riders can relax and ‘leave the driving to us.’ likewise,
witch doctors often wore imposing headdresses. The medieval priest’s
robes, collars, crucifixes, even chastity vows, were symbols of
virtue. Doctors, lawyers, and scientists today have their white coats,
three-piece suits, certificates on the wall, and increasingly,
sophisticated advertising." p. 15
"Historically a success, professional gate keeping
is beginning to fail. the combination of increasing numbers of
applicants and new financial and political pressures on individual
institutions to expand enrollment has weakened collective professional
control. Medicine and law are now experiencing serious regional gluts.
Social service professions, the social sciences, and some natural
sciences face similar problems." p. 97
Lewis J. Perelman, School’s Out,
1992
"Maybe the folks who have been haranguing us to
‘save our schools’ just don’t understand that the classroom and
the teacher have as much place in tomorrow’s learning experience as
the horse and buggy have in modern transportation. Maybe they don’t
see that for the twenty-first century and beyond, learning is in and
school is out." p. 19
Let’s get clear about this: There is no job in this
economy that requires an academic diploma for its successful
performance. None. Nada. Zippo. p 297
F. Allan Hanson,
Testing Testing, 1993
"Intelligence tests are designed in part to
promote equal opportunity, but it happens that test scores are
perfectly correlated with mean family income: those who score highest
on tests have the highest test average family income, and those who
score lowest from families with the lowest average income. Thus
instruments that aim to promote equal opportunity in fact
systematically favor the advantaged to the detriment of the
disadvantaged." p.6
Steven Brint,
In
An Age of Experts, 1994
"In their contemporary reality, professions are,
above all, a phenomenon of labor market organization. They are those
occupations exercising the capacity to create exclusive shelters inn
the labor market through the monopolization of advanced degreases and
other credentials related to higher education that are required for
the attainment of the social and economic opportunities of authorized
practice." p. 23
Charles D. Hayes, Proving
You're Qualified, 1995
"Our massive credentialing system has not
produced a cornucopia of risk-free professional services. Instead,
when we examine the professions we find a small cadre of people who
bring cutting-edge quality and distinction to their work, offset by a
much larger group whose smoldering mediocrity and runaway malpractice
have made us the most litigious society in the world." p. 13
"Credentialing tends to devalue inquiry. Evidence
of credentials renders us less critical than we should be. in a
variety of circumstances I have heard the remark, "Who are they
to be saying that?" Such a question reveals a lot about our
society. The implication is that the right "who" can make
any statement at all without having to justify its veracity. By
focusing so strongly on credentials, we pay too much attention to the
people who give advice and far too little to the advice itself."
p. 13
"Being qualified has nothing to do with
suitability—nothing. So, how fortunate it is that, if we can get the
right credential, produce the right resume, and find the proper
coaching in order to say the right things in an interview, we can be
assured of getting a job that we absolutely shouldn’t have." p.
85
Seymour Papert,
The
Connected Family, 1996
"I know people who never had less than an ‘A’
in French and can tell you about forms of verbs but who would have
trouble asking in a Parisian supermarket where the detergents
are." p.28
David F. Labaree,
How
to Succeed in School without Really Learning, 1997
"When students at all levels see education
through the lens of social mobility, they quickly conclude that what
matters most is not the knowledge they attain in school but the
credentials they acquire there. Grades credits and degrees—these
become the objects to be pursued. The end result is to reify the
formal markers of education and displace the substantive
content." p. 32
Howard Gardner,
The
Disciplined Mind, 1999, pp. 44-45
"In a turnabout from previous trends, the
acquisition of credentials from accredited institutions may be become
less important. Individuals will be able to educate themselves
(largely if not wholly) and to exhibit their mastery in a simulated
setting. Why pay $120,000 to go to law school, if one can `read law’
as in earlier times and then demonstrate one’s legal skills via
computer simulation? Or learn to fly a plane or conduct neurosurgery
by similar means, for that matter."
Ronald Gross,
Peak
Learning, 1999
"Learning from tutors, masters, and mentors
presents a wide range of possibilities. For most of Western history,
this was the way the elite was taught, and it is still prevalent. When
a six-figure executive needs to learn something important, he or she
doesn’t sign up for a class. Instead, the executive has an assistant
find out who the leading local expert on the subject is and hires that
person to come in and work with him or her—not as a tutor, of
course, but as a consultant. Scientists apprentice themselves
in the laboratories of senior scientists, and artists do the
same." pp.297-298
